1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to question/answer (QA) systems, and in particular to clarifying content that is requested from a QA system.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Question/Answer (QA) systems are configured to provide possible answers to questions input by a user, where the answers can include content (or links to content in a web based environment) associated with the answers. However, a QA system can become confused by a question input by a user, for example, due to a terse input or a vagueness of a question being asked. In human-to-human interactions, an important part of question answering is the ability of the person answering a question to ask clarifying questions of the original person asking the question.
In a similar manner, advanced QA systems can take advantage of multiple interpretations of a question in order to come up with a broad set of candidate answers. These advanced QA systems can score the candidate answers using a wide variety of confidence-scoring metrics. It is important to provide adequate confidence-scoring metrics in order to properly ascertain the user's intended meaning of the question so as to provide suitable content in answer to the question.